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What is the world coming to?
Solzenitzen's wife says he was mistranslated in his works about the
Gulag. That they were not literal but rough unproved data that he
meant to write later on. And now Leo Strauss's daughter tells
us that the neo-conservatives mis-represent her father. She too, at
the end, quotes some of the old stuff about either/or that makes her father
so attractive to the Neo-cons. She brings up the word "relativism" and then talks about an
understanding of personal language filters that is supposed to make the
data that we filter "Irrelevant" which is a neo-con way of expressing
things. Those in academia are like old government economists,
they just can't seem to trash the place enough. But they don't
know that the rest of us depend upon the place for our children and our
lives.
Meanwhile the Neo-cons continue to turn language on its
head. I too am a member of the "original intent" movement in
the performance of old musics. But that intent causes all kinds
of interpretations to emerge in the search for the original action on the
audience and why their responses. It makes me use old instruments,
exotic tunings, add notes to the piano when transcribing the textures of
the harpsichord or examine the effect of the volume of sounds to 19th
century audiences and what a Beethoven Forte would mean to them next to 21st
century people who ride the subway. But that kind of "original
intent" would never occur to a Neo-con. Instead they are strictly
late 19th century romantics. They want their interpretation
as THE only intelligent interpretation. Sort of like the
Nordlinger interview from the National Review interviewing Ned Rorem and
trying to trap him in "affirmative action" for composers. This to a
composer, the most economically abused group of expert professionals in
the nation. There is a lack of sensitivity here that makes
complaints about insensitivity seem cloying.
At the end of the interview when she describes her father's
teaching it seems a little more competent. Here there is no
absolutism but simply the authority and generosity of a larger knowledge in the
mind of the teacher. That is the way it should be IMHO.
The key word being humility which seems to me to be the only intelligent choice
when confronting great art. It's a shame that that doesn't include
the other arts than literature or in the case of Milton Friedman, cooking.
Ray Evans Harrell
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Real Leo Strauss
My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago. He was a conservative insofar as he did not think that change is necessarily change for the better. Leo Strauss believed in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to its flaws, he felt it was the best form of government that could be realized, "the last best hope." He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised utopianism � in our time, Nazism and Communism � which is predicated on the denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one's own. His heroes were Churchill and Lincoln. He was not an observant Jew, but he loved the Jewish people and he saw the establishment of Israel as essential to their survival. To me, what characterized him above all else was his total lack of vanity and self-importance. As a result, he had no interest in honors within the academy, and was completely unsuited to political ambition. His own earliest passion, he confessed, was to spend his life raising rabbits (Flemish Giants) and reading Plato. He was first and foremost a teacher. He did not seek to mold people in his own image. Rather, he was devoted to helping young people see the world as it is, in all its misery and splendor. The objects of his teaching were the Great Books, those works generally recognized as the foundation of a liberal education. But that alone was not a sufficient reason for reading them. He began where good teachers should begin, from his students' received opinions, in order to scrutinize their foundation. At that time, as is still true today, academia leaned to the left; hence such questioning required an examination of the left's tenets. Had the prevailing beliefs been different, they too would have been subject to his skeptical inquiry. Among the received opinions of the time was an unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment, or "relativism." Many young people were confused, without a compass, with nothing substantial to admire. My father's turning them to the Great Books was thus motivated not merely by aesthetic or antiquarian interest, but by a search for an understanding of mankind's present predicament: what were its sources and what, if any, were the alternatives? The latter he found in the writings of the ancient Greeks. Furthermore, he insistently confronted his students with the question of the "good life." For him, the choice boiled down to the life in accordance with Revelation or the life according to Reason � Jerusalem versus Athens. The vitality of Western tradition, he felt, lay in the invigorating tension between the two. My father saw reading not as a passive exercise but as taking part in an active dialogue with the great minds of the past. One had to read with great care, great respect, and try, as he always said, to "understand the author as he understood himself." Today this task, admittedly difficult and demanding, is dismissed in fashionable academia as impossible. Rather, we are told, each reader inevitably constructs his own text over which the author has no control, and the writer's intentions are irrelevant. The fact is that Leo Strauss also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his authors to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed; others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father's rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy. Although I was never a student of my father's, I sat in on a class of his in the 1960's; I think it was on Xenophon's "Cyropaedia." He was a small, unprepossessing and, truth be told, ugly man (daughters are their parents' worst critics), with none of the charisma that one associates with "great teachers." And yet there was something utterly charming. One of the students would read little chunks of the text, and my father would comment and call for discussion. What marked this class was a combination of an engagement with questions of the highest seriousness (in this case, what is the best form of government) with the laughter of intellectual play. It was magic. If only the truth had the power to make the misrepresentations of his achievement vanish like smoke and dust. Jenny Strauss Clay is a professor of classics at the University of Virginia. |
HARLOTTESVILLE, Va.